Ruby and GEOS

A while back I created an initial SWIG interface for GEOS (Geometry Engine - Open Source), focusing on Python. I have subsequently stepped off the SWIG train (they lost me during the big changes made at 1.3.28), but Charlie Savage is forging ahead. The focus is now on Ruby, but if SWIG's unified typemaps work as advertised, bindings for other languages should follow trivially.

One complication is that the GEOS C++ API is a moving target. If the new language bindings are derived literally (as I did originally) from a changing C++ API, your Ruby or Python scripts could be broken by new GEOS releases. This is the reason why I went with the C API for PCL's geometry module. I think Charlie will be able to tweak the SWIG interface to maintain a stable Ruby API, but this was something I found myself unwilling to do.